The new information came during interviews this week with House Democratic members. The contact Wylie revealed was “substantive and separate” from previously reported contacts between Julian Assange and Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix, the members of Congress told BuzzFeed News.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed new and potentially significant ties between his former company and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to House Democrats who interviewed Wylie this week.

Cambridge Analytica worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, helping target voters through social media. Company officials have taken credit for Trump’s victory, but the Trump campaign said Cambridge’s claims are overstated.

Neither Swalwell nor Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, would describe the new connection, but Swalwell said it was “substantive and separate” from the previously reported contact between Assange and Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix, in which Nix sought to help WikiLeaks release Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.

Schiff said in a statement that Wylie had disclosed “several previously unknown connections” between Cambridge Analytica, Assange, and WikiLeaks.

Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information later used by Cambridge Analytica, established his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research (GSR). That firm was granted access to large-scale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015, according to Twitter.

“In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.”

The company has removed Cambridge Analytica and affiliated entities as advertisers. Twitter said GSR paid for the access; it provided no further details. ...

About 270,000 people downloaded Kogan’s personality quiz app, which shared information the people and their friends that was then improperly passed to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has testified in front of Congress about the misuse of data, and lawmakers have called on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to testify as well.

Criticism of Twitter’s failure to prevent misinformation and abuse on its platform has risen since the 2016 election. In the first quarter, the company removed more than 142,000 applications connected to the Twitter API that was collectively responsible for more than 130 million “low-quality” tweets during the period. The company has also limited the ability of users to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts.

On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica employees learned that its parent company, the SCL Group, was shuttering its U.S. offices, with American-based workers directed to return their keycards immediately, according to documentation reviewed by Gizmodo.

The news was announced during a conference call led by Julian Wheatland, the current chairman of the SCL Group who was reportedly tapped to take over as Cambridge Analytica’s next CEO. The fate of the entire company remains unclear.

During the call, Wheatland said that the board determined that rebranding the company’s current offerings in the current environment is “futile.”

Cambridge Analytica and SCL have offices in London, New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. The conference call was originally scheduled for Tuesday morning, but was repeatedly pushed back until early Wednesday afternoon, ultimately getting rescheduled more than half a dozen times.

Adding:

The Register UK: Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It's just changing its name to Emerdata

It's May 1 gone and the EC GDPR rulings are now enforced to the full extent of the law, eg fines and prison sentences are looming around the corner. For companies based in the EU this encompasses their international operations too. And Cambridge Analytica may want to lower its US exposure over potential law suites.

Cambridge Analytica Just Went Out of Business. Don’t Worry, Its Owners and Executives Have Already Started a New Company. ...

The hits kept coming. The British Information Commissioner’s Office executed a warrant to search Cambridge’s London offices. An undercover investigation by the UK’s Channel 4 News showed CEO Alexander Nix entertaining a potential client and offering to deploy “very beautiful” Ukrainian “girls” to catch a politician in a comprising situation. Nix was suspended from the company on March 20. His problems may not be over: Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, recently noted that Nix “certainly appears to have given false testimony under oath” when he told the committee last year that Cambridge had never acquired bulk data through Facebook.

In recent weeks, Cambridge mounted an aggressive counter-offensive to rebut its critics and try to move the company past its wave of scandals. It launched a website, CambridgeFacts.com, that denied the company had improperly obtained Facebook data or worked on the 2016 Brexit referendum, while dramatically downplaying its role on the Cruz and Trump campaigns.

Cambridge’s demise won’t be the last we’ll hear from Nix and the Mercer family. In mid-March, reporters uncovered a mysterious British company named Emerdata that had added two of Robert Mercer’s daughters, Rebekah and Jennifer, as directors the day before the Facebook data controversy exploded into public view. Company records show that another one of Emerdata’s directors is Johnson Chun Shun Ko, a businessman with ties to Erik Prince, the military contractor and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. As for the three remaining Brits listed as Emerdata directors, all three of them—Alex Tayler, Julian Wheatland, and Alexander Nix—held senior roles at Cambridge Analytica. Their story, in other words, is far from over.

"The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press." - Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, feminist and founder with others of NAACP.

Billionaire Robert Mercer did Trump a huge favor. Will he get a payback?
BY BY SCOTT CHRISTIANSON AND GREG GORDON

McClatchy Washington Bureau
May 01, 2017 06:00 AM

The Internal Revenue Service is demanding a whopping $7 billion or more in back taxes from the world’s most profitable hedge fund, whose boss’s wealth and cyber savvy helped Donald Trump pole-vault into the White House.

Suddenly, the government’s seven-year pursuit of Renaissance Technologies LLC is blanketed in political intrigue, now that the hedge fund’s reclusive, anti-establishment co-chief executive, Robert Mercer, has morphed into a political force who might be owed a big presidential favor.

With Trump in the Oval Office, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who has become his public voice, seem armed with political firepower every which way you look – and that’s even though presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, their former senior executive and political strategist, appears to have recently lost influence.

Since the IRS found in 2010 that a complicated banking method used by Renaissance and about 10 other hedge funds was a tax-avoidance scheme, Mercer has gotten increasingly active in politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, he doled out more than $22 million to outside conservative groups seeking to influence last year’s elections, while advocating the abolition of the IRS and much of the federal government.

The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah Mercer, also has donated millions of dollars to conservative nonprofit groups that have called for the firing of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, an Obama administration holdover whose five-year term expires in November.

One of them, the Heritage Foundation, received $1.5 million from the Mercer foundation from 2013 through 2015, according to its most recent public tax filings.

It's not Mercer personally that owes the IRS but his hedge fund. The tweet is misleading. His hedge fund (and some others too) are in dispute with the IRS over creative bookkeeping practices over several years. If the IRS prevails it will set back Mercers fund about 10% of its assets.

How do 87m records scraped from Facebook become an advertising campaign that could help swing an election? What does gathering that much data actually involve? And what does that data tell us about ourselves?

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has raised question after question, but for many, the technological USP of the company, which announced last week that it was closing its operations, remains a mystery.

For those 87 million people probably wondering what was actually done with their data, I went back to Christopher Wylie, the ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on the company’s problematic operations in the Observer. According to Wylie, all you need to know is a little bit about data science, a little bit about bored rich women, and a little bit about human psychology...

Step one, he says, over the phone as he scrambles to catch a train: “When you’re building an algorithm, you first need to create a training set.” That is: no matter what you want to use fancy data science to discover, you first need to gather the old-fashioned way. Before you can use Facebook likes to predict a person’s psychological profile, you need to get a few hundred thousand people to do a 120-question personality quiz.

The “training set” refers, then, to that data in its entirety: the Facebook likes, the personality tests, and everything else you want to learn from. Most important, it needs to contain your “feature set”: “The underlying data that you want to make predictions on,” Wylie says. “In this case, it’s Facebook data, but it could be, for example, text, like natural language, or it could be clickstream data” – the complete record of your browsing activity on the web.“Those are all the features that you want to [use to] predict.”

Exclusive: Social network failed to make firm delete valuable models derived from data until campaign was over

Facebook’s failure to compel Cambridge Analytica to delete all traces of data from its servers – including any “derivatives” – enabled the company to retain predictive models derived from millions of social media profiles throughout the US presidential election, the Guardian can reveal.

Leaked emails reveal that when Cambridge Analytica told Facebook almost a year before the election that it had deleted data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users, it stopped short of agreeing to also erase derivatives of the data.

The correspondence, obtained by the Guardian, also raises questions about the accuracy of the testimony that Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, gave to the US Congress last month. ...

Donald Trump hired Cambridge Analytica after he became the Republican nominee months later and, according to two former employees, the company retained models and aggregated versions of Facebook data throughout the presidential campaign and beyond. Facebook did not secure confirmation that the models had also been deleted until April 2017.

Facebook Placed An Employee Who Harvested User Data For Cambridge Analytica On Leave

Facebook is now conducting an investigation into Joseph Chancellor, who cofounded a company that sold Facebook user information used by Cambridge Analytica.

A Facebook employee, who helped harvest and sell data from millions of users of the social network for political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica in a previous job, has quietly been placed on administrative leave by the Menlo Park, California–based company.

Joseph Chancellor, a quantitative social psychologist for Facebook, has been on leave for a few weeks following revelations of his role in a data privacy scandal that has rocked the Silicon Valley giant, according to two sources familiar with the situation. In March, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a consulting company that did elections work for Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump, inappropriately obtained user data from a third-party app developer. That app company, Global Science Research (GSR), was founded by Chancellor and his research partner Aleksandr Kogan, and obtained Facebook user data on up to 87 million people.

Kogan's involvement in the scandal has resulted in international headlines and testimony before a parliamentary committee last month. Meanwhile, Chancellor, who was hired by Facebook in November 2015 after leaving GSR, has managed to largely avoid the press. He did not return a request for comment for this story. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Chancellor’s employment at Facebook has put the company in the difficult position of explaining why it hired a person who violated its developer terms of service by transferring user data to another party. Damian Collins, the chair of the UK parliament’s digital, culture, media, and sport (DCMS) select committee, noted the issue when addressing Kogan during a hearing last month.

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are preparing to release 3,000 Russia-linked Facebook ads, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would offer the broadest picture yet of how the social network was manipulated during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The ads, which Facebook Inc. identified as bought by the pro-Kremlin Internet Research Agency, could be released as early as this week, some of the people said. But the timing could slip to next week or later as Facebook and Democrats haggle.

Exposing Russia’s Effort to Sow Discord Online: The Internet Research Agency and Advertisements

WaPo: These are the 3,400 Facebook ads purchased by Russia’s online trolls around the 2016 election

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released about 3,400 Facebook ads purchased by Russian agents around the 2016 presidential election on issues from immigration to gun control, a reminder of the complexity of the manipulation that Facebook is trying to contain ahead of the midterm elections.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the F.B.I. are investigating Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct political data firm, and have sought to question former employees and banks that handled its business, according to an American official and other people familiar with the inquiry.

Prosecutors have questioned potential witnesses in recent weeks, telling them that there is an open investigation into Cambridge Analytica — which worked on President Trump’s election and other Republican campaigns in 2016 — and “associated U.S. persons.” But the prosecutors provided few other details, and the inquiry appears to be in its early stages, with investigators seeking an overview of the company and its business practices.

The investigation compounds the woes of a firm that has come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in the United States and Britain since The New York Times and Observer in London reported in March that it had harvested private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles, and that it may have violated American election laws. Earlier this month, Cambridge Analytica announced that it would shut down and declare bankruptcy, saying that negative press and cascading federal and state investigations had driven away customers and made it impossible for the firm to remain in business. ...

The company, whose principal owner is the wealthy Republican donor Robert Mercer, offered tools that it claimed could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. Its so-called psychographic modeling techniques, which were built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned Cambridge’s work for the Trump campaign in 2016. ...

The federal investigation in the United States appears to focus on the company’s financial dealings — investigators have reached out to the company’s banks, for instance — and how it acquired and used personal data pulled from Facebook and other sources, according to the American official, who was briefed on the inquiry, and other people familiar with it. ...

In a sign of the inquiry’s scope, one of the prosecutors involved is the assistant chief of the Justice Department’s securities and financial fraud division, Brian Kidd. The effort is being assisted by at least one agent who investigates cybercrime for the F.B.I., those people said.

Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica who provided multiple reports about how the London-based data firm misused Facebook data during the 2016 election, is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday as part of Congressional lawmakers probe into data privacy and security.

In March, Wylie's reports showed that Facebook's mishandling of user data enabled Cambridge Analytica to gain information on as many as 87 million people, allowing the firm, once used by the Trump campaign, to create targeted political advertising.

The revelations have since forced the social media titan and other tech companies to reevaluate how they manage user data.

At data privacy hearing, Ted Cruz again avoids mention of his use of Cambridge Analytica

WASHINGTON — In a Senate hearing Wednesday on data privacy and the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, Sen. Ted Cruz downplayed its work for the Trump campaign and made no mention of his own campaign's use of the voter targeting firm, which is now reported to be under federal investigation.

Sidestepping whether the firm improperly used data from millions of Facebook users to help boost GOP candidates, the Texan repeated a contention that a biased Facebook had helped Democrat Barack Obama's chances long before Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 election.

Americans are “rightly concerned about privacy and security of our data,” Cruz said, adding that while “much of the media attention in recent weeks and months has focused on the data operation of the Trump campaign,” it’s hardly the first to use data to reach voters. ...

This was the second hearing on data privacy in the last five weeks at which Cruz railed against bias in Silicon Valley and avoided mention of his own connection to Cambridge, a firm bankrolled by the billionaire GOP donor Robert Mercer. Cruz hired the firm for his 2016 presidential bid, which Mercer supported. After the Texan exited the race, Mercer and the firm switched allegiance to Trump.

Ninja'ed by the ever swift Addie!!!!
The comparison between Obama's use of social media and Cruz's is worth noting.

Cambridge, according to Facebook, acquired its data through a University of Cambridge psychology lecturer with ties to Russia who developed a personality prediction app and billed it as a “research app.” About 270,000 people downloaded the app, unaware that it would be used by a third party to harvest data on their friend networks and that the data would be transferred and used in political campaigns.

The Obama campaign also acquired data using a Facebook app, but with the stated purpose of supporting a political campaign, according to Politifact. That app “asked users’ permission" to scan their photos or friends lists.

But critics have pointed out that the friends of the users would not have known the data was being shared.

"The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press." - Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, feminist and founder with others of NAACP.

The Cruz campaign had the most sophisticated data operation ever used in a political campaign. They were microtargeting down to a single voter. But their problem was that their candidate had a very punchable face, and the resources they needed to overcome that had already started cutting deals with the Trump people.

BRUSSELS (AP) — Facebook said Thursday it will not compensate users in the scandal over the misuse of their personal data by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

The company made the statement in a list of written replies to questions by European Union lawmakers. The answers were promised after testimony earlier this week by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Brussels had left EU lawmakers frustrated about a lack of responses.

Cambridge Analytica used the data of millions of Facebook users to target ads during political campaigns, including allegedly the U.S. presidential vote.

EU lawmakers said that would make Facebook liable for compensation toward EU users.

Facebook said the misuse of data was a “breach of trust,” but noted that no bank account or credit card details had been shared. And it said there was no evidence EU user data had been involved.

Facebook disclosure requirements for political ads take effect in the United States today

Facebook’s new rules regarding disclosures for political ads take effect in the United States today, requiring election-related and issue ads to include information about who paid for them. A new “paid for” label will be visible at the top of ads on Facebook and Instagram, and clicking it will take you to a page with information about the cost of the ad and the demographic breakdown of the audience that saw it.

Advertisers will also have to verify their identity and location, a move that Facebook says will discourage foreign agents from attempting to interfere in outside elections. Facebook announced new rules around ad disclosures last year after revelations that Russians had illegally run ads on the platform during the 2016 US presidential election. The company began testing its new disclosure policies in Canada earlier this year.

Under the new policies, you’ll be able to see information about the age, location, and gender of the audiences for political ads. Among other things, this will let citizens and academic researchers examine how candidates for office appeal to different groups, and it will hold them accountable if they send conflicting messages. Facebook will store and make available the past seven years of political ads beginning when the new rules take effect. (You can see them at facebook.com/politicalcontentads.)

If you see an ad that you believe isn’t labeled but should be, you will be able to report it. Facebook says it will ban people who attempt to run political ads without first verifying their identities. Facebook created an initial list of 20 political issues that will require disclosures if they have the goal of influencing public debate, promoting a ballot measure, or electing a candidate. That list will expand and evolve over time, the company said.